Musings of a Local by Iris Mead - HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH OF CURLING?

MARGARETVILLE — Now that the Olympic Games have (finally) ended, we can get back to our regular television viewing and on with life.  Does it seem to you that the Curling competition dominated a lot of viewing time for the past two weeks?  Yes.  Every four years it becomes a “thing” to watch, try to figure out the scoring and vocabulary and spoof.  Curling is not a fast-moving game, rather a slow and precise game of getting those stones to curl into the circles in the “house.”

Curling dates back to the early 16th century Scotland when it appeared in print in a poem in Perth, Scotland in 1620.  The first Curling club was formed in 1716 in Kilsyth, Scotland and is still in existence today.  Early “stones” were flat-bottomed stones from rivers or fields with no consistency or handles. Using these stones relied on luck rather than precision or strategy.  Curling became popular in Canada and New Zealand due to its Scottish settlers and it remains a popular sport in both countries. The first Curling club was established in Canada in 1830.  The sport was finally recognized by the Olympic Coordination Committee as an Olympic sport at the 1998 Games. Canadians have been successful since then winning two medals at each succeeding Olympics and the Canadian women’s team just added another gold medal to the count.

During the course of a conversation about curling at the Olympics, a friend of mine mentioned that the granite used to make the stones comes from a place near her hometown in Scotland, an uninhabited island in the Firth of Clyde off the Ayrshire coast of Scotland called Ailsa Craig.  Growing up not far from the seashore, there was always the excitement of seeing the Island when she went to the shore.  It is also called Paddy’s Mile as it is situated halfway between Glasgow and Belfast, and  translates in Gaelic as Fairy Rock.  It also acts as a weather forecaster for when it is covered in clouds it’s a sign of rain to come.

The island has been owned by the family of the Marquess of Ailsa since 1560. The granite is quarried in amounts of 2,000 pounds in blocks and then transported to the mainland by boat to a factory in Mauchline, Scotland, owned by the Kays family.  To this day, the Kays family continues to make curling stones for the Olympic Games.  At the factory they are made to exacting specifications so that every stone thrown anywhere in the world will behave the same way.  Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 stones are made in a typical year, with increases during an Olympic year.  The stones cost around $950 each and a full set consists of 16 matched stones.  There is one other mine that provides granite for curling stones in Wales.  As long as the granite holds out on the Island, curling stones will be from Ailsa Craig.